As I watched Mason Miller walk the bases loaded in game two of the NLDS and eventually surrender the lead and the game, two thoughts crossed my mind.
First, “So it’s not just the Astros”, and the second, “Just how bad were the Astros at this?”
The answer is damn near historically bad.
The MLB BB% has been creeping up year over year, from 8.2% in 2024 to 8.4% in 2025 to 8.9% this past season.
Meanwhile, after dipping from 9.0% to 8.4% from 2024 to 2025, the Astros pitchers’ BB% shot up 2.1% year over year to finish 2026 at a whopping 10.5%.
That jump and its place on the graph made me wonder just how bad they have been historically, say since they won their first World Series title back in 2017.
Bad. Real bad.
Houston’s 10.5% this season appears to be the second-worst BB% of any team over a full 162-game season in the last 9 seasons (excluding the 60-game schedule of 2020). The only worse rate came during the 2023 season by the Oakland Athletics.
The A’s lost 112 games that year.
That makes Houston’s 2026 performance more extreme than I initially realized.
They weren’t just bad; they were nearly historically bad.
The Astros used a lot of arms this season, but it was more than just that.
Hunter Brown’s BB% went from 7.8% in 2025 to 12.2% in 2026, Bryan Abreu’s from 10.5% to 15.3%, while others (De Los Santos, Blubaugh, and Okert, for example) went down to varying degrees.
So, while not every pitcher had a problem throwing strikes, this was a team-wide issue. You don’t walk 650 batters at a rate seen once in 9 seasons without it being a widespread issue.
Think about it this way: those 9 seasons mean there were 269 teams (30 x 9 minus the 2026 Astros) that had a chance to walk batters at a higher percentage than the 2026 Astros did.
Only one was worse. One of the last 269 = 0.0037% of teams had a worse walk rate than the 2026 Astros
Root Cause?
With the league BB% creeping up, one has to wonder if ABS has something to do with this, at least the 2026 jump, but why would the Astros suffer so badly?
For me, it’s likely pretty simple: the quality of the arms and perhaps a dash of ABS.
Dana Brown went with a lot of arms without, or with minimal, Major League experience, from Imai to Weiss to Bolton to Roa and on and on. Throw in ABS and injuries, and you have the mess we saw in 2026.
In the Championship seasons of 2017 and 2022, the Astros were below the league average in walks.
Yes, I know who was on those pitching staffs, and I know the current staff is nowhere near that level - that’s the point.
This can’t be fixed on the margins. It’s a team-wide epidemic from the “ace” to the last guy in the bullpen.